Dr Tao You

Fungal diseases affect approximately 1.2 billion individuals worldwide with at least 1.5 million deaths each year. The emergence of resistant strains made clinical treatment failures more frequent. There is an urgent to treat drug resistant Candida spp. and Candida auris. In the UK, invasive and serious fungal disease impacts between 240k – 660k patients annually, causing more deaths than some superbugs.

There are 4 major classes of antifungal drugs. Unfortunately, the utilities for these are limited by safety and efficacy issues.

My interest is to discover and develop novel small molecule based treatments with broad spectrum antifungal activity. This involves the assessment of novel targets, designing and screening small molecules, and drug development. I work with the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology (University of Exeter) and Professor Janet Quinn (Newcastle University) on this.

PhD Opportunity:
A systems biology analysis of thioredoxin reductase inhibition to support discovery of a novel antifungal treatment
(Project Description on FindAPhD)

1) Lung Cancer Screening
Many lung cancer cases are identified at the late stage where treatment options are limited. I am helping to identify and validate blood borne biomarkers that predict people at high risk of developing lung cancer or patients with undiagnosed disease.

2) Cancer Patient Stratification
Tumour heterogeneity limits the efficacy of targeted cancer therapies and compromises treatment outcomes. Most patients with advanced cancers treated with appropriately selected targeted therapies ultimately become resistant to the therapy, developing disease progression and succumbing to metastatic disease.

My goal is to develop and validate novel algorithms which combine bioinformatics (genome-scale data characterising the patients, pre-treatments) with PK/PD modelling (tumour size changes in each patient, drug kinetics) to ultimately advise and optimise patient treatment outcomes. I collaborate with Genomics England on this.

PhD opportunity: Personalising cancer treatment with modelling tumour evolution based on genomics biomarkers and PK/PD (Project Description on FindAPhD)

3) Cardiovascular Disease Risk Modelling
The risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is orchestrated by multiple factors. QRISK models (currently QRISK3) have been used in the UK to estimate CVD risk within the next 10 years for individuals without CVD. This helps identify those for whom interventions or more frequent assessment may be needed. QRISK models brought cost benefits for the healthcare system.

My interest is to improve the accuracy of the CVD risk predictions by developing novel modelling framework that is independent of the COX proportional modelling used to develop QRISK models.

PhD opportunity: Network-based predictive modelling of cardiovascular disease risk (Project Description on FindAPhD)

Vitamin D is important for the prevention of osteoporosis and cancer. Unfortunately, vitamin D deficiency is common around the world. In North America, the prevalence of severe deficiency increased to 10% between 2001 and 2006. In Europe, vitamin D deficiency in most countries is over 20%. In the UK, hypovitaminosis D in most regions is over 30% in spring. It is particularly serious among the British elderly and it is also reported among British adolescents.

We have developed the world's first accurate PBPK model that predicts the serum pharmacokinetics profile of vitamin D3 and its active metabolite for an extremely wide range of doses of vitamin D3. This model predicts the population average behaviour. Currently, we are refining this model with the ultimate goal of accurately predicting individual serum profiles to advise clinical dose selection. Project Details
Model and data on GitHub